A wireless mesh network can have both battery-powered and powered nodes. Randomly connecting battery-powered and powered nodes can lead to poor performance of the mesh network especially for the battery-powered nodes. For example, a battery-powered node may have been assigned connections such that substantial traffic is routed through the node. In addition, randomly connecting battery-powered and powered nodes can lead to poor performance of the mesh network in terms of the latency time associated with moving a packet from any given node and a gateway node.